A Memoir Returns to Two Troubled Parents and Their Premature Deaths

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DOWN CITY A Daughter’s Story of Love, Memory and MurderBy Leah Carroll 228 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $26.

Two very short sections open Leah Carroll’s memoir: the description of her mother’s murder in a seedy hotel room, and the description of her father’s death in an equally seedy hotel room 14 years later. Carroll proceeds from these haunting twin plot points through a patchwork of vignettes, reportage and reflection that reaches after her absent parents with sensitive longing.

Carroll was only 4 years old when her mother was brutally strangled by two drug dealers with mob ties, the cold description of which she reads as an adult in newspapers. The drug dealers had suspected her mother of being a police informant, and were ultimately offered light sentences for their horrific crime in exchange for incriminating information on an important local mob family. Carroll writes about her discovery of her mother’s murder used as a bargaining chip by the state with understandable bitterness: “I’ll never know if my mom gave confidential information to the police or not. I do know that almost everyone involved . . . saw her as a disposable person.”

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Five months pass before one of the killers reveals where he’d dumped Carroll’s mother’s body beside a highway, and in the meantime, she is introduced to an ever-shifting family structure with her volatile, alcoholic father at the helm. He remarries and moves Carroll from gritty “down city” Providence to a comfortable suburb until this family, too, breaks apart; caught between two worlds, Carroll renders meticulous and empathetic portraits of both sides of Providence in the ’90s.

Carroll’s writing is most evocative when she describes, with a heartbreaking mixture of tenderness and disappointment, the moments of intimate connection between her and her father, her struggle to enjoy spending time with him even as she knows she will later find him drunk and helpless on the kitchen floor.

“It seems we cannot spontaneously feel important enough to ourselves, sufficiently worthy of carrying our absurd figure through the tangles of life, unless at some point . . . we were privileged enough to derive a sense of mattering limitlessly and inordinately to another person,” Alain de Botton wrote on the crucial role of a parent’s unconditional love to a healthy psyche. While Carroll occupies herself with tracking down the details of her parents’ lives, her readers become increasingly aware of what not “mattering limitlessly and inordinately” to either parent can do to a child as she grows; in Carroll’s case, how a mixture of manic depression and powerful addictions to drugs and alcohol overwhelmed her parents and left her estranged.

The power silence has to impose a kind of order on disordered family relationships is not lost on Carroll, as she connects the threads of her family’s silence over her mother’s death to the “invisible barrier, years of so much unsaid,” between herself and her father. When he dies, she offers her readers both the full text of his last note to her — which appears to read like a suicide note — and his autopsy report, which claims he dies of an enlarged heart and diseased liver due to his alcoholism. These documents offer, as she describes it, “proof” of him, a few pieces of tangible closure after years of uncertainty.

Ultimately, Carroll untangles her identity from her parents’, acknowledging her mother as “a woman who existed entirely outside of my existence,” and the acceptance of this fact offers closure and inspires a pledge to ensure her mother’s life — and her father’s life — mattered deeply, and are redeemed by Carroll’s compassionate reflection on their lives.

Molly Brodak is the author of the poetry collection “A Little Middle of the Night” and “Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir.”